These two concertos show the increasing importance of the guitar duo on the world’s concert stages. Leo Brouwer, one of the foremost Latin American composers, has written many admired guitar concertos but The Book of Signs is his first for two guitars, a double concerto of great virtuosity, with a majestic, songful theme in its central movement. A crucial figure in the global promotion of Brazilian rhythms for the guitar, Paulo Bellinati deploys luxurious harmonies and brilliantly effective techniques to pay tribute to the country music of São Paulo State in Concerto Caboclo.

At the start of the 20th century, the format of the guitar duet would come to suffer from the same problem as the solo guitar: a radical lack of post-romantic works written by composers other than guitarists. The Presti-Lagoya duet, for example, managed to persuade composers like Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco and Joaquín Rodrigo to write specifically for duets, but the repertoire remained rather thin for a very long time. So here are some beautiful rarities, one from the Cuban Leo Brouwer whose 2003 The Book of Signs, built in large part on the theme from Beethoven’s 32 Variations: Brouwer’s style borrows as much from Afro-Cuban rhythms as from the rigorous writing style of today’s composers. Of course, Brouwer is a guitarist himself and has mastered the instrument, including its most extravagant possibilities. This means he knows just how far he can push his soloists! As for the Italian-Uruguayan composer Paulo Bellinati, his Concerto Caboclo is a pretty cosmopolitan work, as signalled by the title – in Brazilian Portuguese, “Caboclo” refers to a person of mixed Amerindian-European or African-Amerindian heritage – and in it, we hear as much the heritage of a Baden-Powell and all the richness of Brazilian folk music as of Villa-Lobos and others of his stripe. With this release, the Brasil Guitar Duo, which has performed across the Americas with groups like the Dallas and Houston Orchestras, offer two world-first recordings of a very high quality.